e-reader

Holiday sales figures are in, and not surprisingly tablets and eReaders were popular gifts this year. Amazon is reporting that Cyber Monday was the best-ever sales day for their Kindle line. A new Pew Research poll shows more people are reading books electronically than ever before, and fewer people are reading physical books now than last year. People reading books electronically doesn't mean printed books are dead. Kindles don't come with the stipulation that, if you own one, you have to burn all your books and vow to never buy one again. You can have both, and, if you're an avid reader, you probably should.

Why Not Do It With Some Style?

If you're a book lover like I am, it both excited and vexed you when e-readers were invented. True, you could have any number of books ready to read at a whim but the downside is, no one else knew what you were reading. Here's one solution via Etsy user NovelCreations - book purses! See if your favorite old or new classic has been turned into a e-reader transportation device.
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and let it be known

It's not your grandpa's book market anymore. While the world's eyes may often be focused on the effects kindles and nooks and iPads and other e-reader options may be having on literature and book sales, there's an entirely different "coup" happening in the population of book consumers. Baby Boomers have long dominated the book-buying market, but no longer; Generation Y has taken over that honor.

This is just like magic!

For a long time, Harry Potter fans were wondering when J.K. Rowling's novels about the boy wizard would make their way to e-readers. Turns out, she was holding out for something extra special - Pottermore. Although you can download the series onto Sony Reader, Kindle, the Nook, and Google Play, and the retailers get a cut of the sales, the power still resides with Pottermore. Until now. Rowling has struck a deal with Amazon to offer all of the Harry Potter books through their lending library.
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Firsts

You know, I thought it was kind of funny when Amazon named their latest Kindle, Fire. It made me think about book burnings and specifically, Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451. So it was even more interesting when I read the news today that 91-year-old Bradbury finally conceded to transferring his famous novel to the digital format. That's hot.
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Breaking

This morning, editorial director of Marvel.com, Ryan Penagos, live tweeted from Barnes & Noble's NOOK event in New York City. Why was the Marvel employee in attendance? In addition to revealing their new Nook tablet, Barnes & Noble announced they would soon be carrying Marvel digital comics on the device in their first-ever electronic pairing with the bookseller.
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Highly Successful Marketing Strategies

DC Comics made a few people angry recently when they decided to make an exclusive deal with Amazon for over 100 of their digital comics to be available on the new Kindle Fire. Barnes & Noble notably took offense to such a decision and pulled DC graphic novels from their physical store shelves. Books-a-Million followed soon after. Well now it seems as if the publisher is backtracking a bit to quell this particular fire. They've told the New York Times the exclusivity is not quite as exclusive as they first claimed.
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Not to be outdone by its predecessor, Doom--basically the "Hello, world!" of video games--the above video shows Doom II being run on an e-Reader. What makes Doom II's appearance impressive, though, is that the e-Reader in question, a Pocketbook 360 Plus prototype, sports an e-Ink screen, rather than some fancy tablet-style screen. The e-Reader is running a Linux port of Doom II, called PrBoom. Though the FPS of the game in the above video isn't exactly amazing, it is pretty impressive for being displayed on an e-Ink screen, which happens to be an e-Ink Vizplex V110, with the rest of the unit running on 128 MB of RAM and a FreeScale i.MX35 ARM11 533MHz CPU.

Barnes & Noble announced a major update to their Nook e-reader line yesterday: The Nook Color. The device has a 7 inch full color LCD touchscreen with a 1024x600 resolution with 16 million colors, has a film on the screen to help reduce glare, runs on Android, has 8 gigabytes of storage, and has built-in WiFi, as well as integration with Facebook and Twitter. It'll be launching at a $249 price point and will be shipped starting November 19.
Barnes & Noble seems to be marketing the Nook Color as a hybrid e-reader and tablet computer, though from various impressions around the web, the device is being met with mixed reviews. Read on past the jump for a mini round-up of praise and criticism.